Weather Forecast

Voter fraud is imaginary problem

By Peter W. Johnsonfrom Superior on Jul 18, 2014 at 7:00 a.m.

Concerning the June 10 We the People writer who complained about Democratic voting fraud — the Judicial Watch, and its election integrity project supports True the Vote — a group that claims devotion to eliminating voting fraud. Although Judicial Watch has sometimes supported Democrats, it still displays partisan motives as mentioned by Wikipedia. Furthermore, True the Vote is an organization that claims to police voter fraud, but actually supports passing voter suppression laws. They have been accused of promoting voter intimidation by standing directly behind voters casting their ballots. As a charitable group, True the Vote is required not to participate in campaign activity.

True the Vote actually started as a project of the Houston-based Tea Party group, King Street patriots.

No political affiliations there of course —sarcasm intended.

In reality, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State was already known as a notorious vote suppressor, and Ohio was already participating voluntary in a 24-state program of crosschecking to determine if votes had been cast in more than one state. So, all this ruling did was ensure a procedure already in place, but now locked in until 2018.

This system of cross checks has a history of unreliability. For example, local voter registrars in Virginia, also part of the system, maintain they discovered an up to a 17 percent error rate, which falsely flagged voters who voted more recently in Virginia than out of state and were still eligible to cast legal votes in Virginia.

As expected, many Republican-controlled legislatures are considering mandating the checklist to remove voters considered suspicious. Secretary Jon Husted of Ohio had already pursued numerous voter suppression efforts such as cutting early voting options, supporting partisan gerrymandering and attempting to throw out legally cast provisional ballots.

There is very, very little evidence of voter impersonation types of fraud intended to be prevented by photo voter IDs, with their legislative attachments, even exists. Federal Appeals Judge Richard Posner admitted making a mistake when upholding such legislation in Indiana, admitting the law is of a type regarded as a form of voter suppression.

So, when Husted agreed to Judicial Watch’s demands in an out of court settlement, this move was merely for show — since the interstate review check system had been established long ago, and represents only a suspiciously unreliable system used to falsely disenfranchise voters.